


Any Other Day

by Kirsten



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Espionage, F/M, Journalism, Occupation, Original Female Character - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-09-07
Updated: 2005-09-07
Packaged: 2017-10-13 14:50:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/138553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirsten/pseuds/Kirsten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jake likes to start his day with a raktajino at Quark's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Any Other Day

Jake likes to start his day with a raktajino at Quark's. It gets him out and about among the crowds. He sits in a dark corner by a bulkhead and listens. He listens to Cardassians talk about Bajorans. He listens to Bajorans talk about Cardassians. He listens to Quark talk about everybody, and he listens to the silence of the Jem'Hadar.

Silence, Jake has learned, can be just as revealing as any amount of talk.

The Dabo tables start as soon as the girls get here, and Jake will finish his raktajino, leave his mug at the table and go play a few rounds. Sometimes he wins. Sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes a voice will whisper in his mind: Save your latinum. The table doesn't like you today. So Jake quits early and saves his latinum. It's why he always has a few bars to spare.

Latinum is very important on Terek Nor.

The Dabo girls like to talk, and for an extra bar of latinum the girls will whisper right into his ear. An easy thing for a pretty girl to do (and all of Quark's girls are pretty), especially for a pretty young man, human, exotic now the Federation's gone. Slightly suspicious, maybe, the former captain's son, but Jake likes to think he's hiding in plain sight. Weyoun and Dukat know where his loyalties lie. But really, he's just a reporter.

Dabo girls know how to listen, too. They hear a lot of things around a Dabo table. Cardassians like to brag to each other, and they don't mind bragging in front of a pretty girl. The pretty girl won't remember any of it, after all, she's all breasts and no brains, wouldn't know a phaser from a laser welder.

Sometimes Cardassians really are that dumb.

Sometimes the girls haven't heard anything, but most of the time they have. It's Greta who winds an arm about his waist and puts her head against his shoulder. She whispers about Vedek Yassim, about protests, about evil. Jake kisses her cheek, whispers a thank you.

Greta is Bajoran.

Dabo after raktajino can make a guy hungry, so Jake will go back to his quarters and replicate something. It's impossible to get Federation food (he thinks maybe Weyoun and Dukat do it to spite Jake personally) but Bajoran is still on offer, likewise Klingon, so Jake sticks to that and he's full if not content. Mealtimes are the times he misses his dad the most.

Jake likes to sit and think about the things the girls have told him. He makes notes, and compares them to notes of things he's heard before. Vedek Yassim is listed under Vedeks and can be cross-referenced to stardate 51106.4. An agitator, according to Marta, who heard it from the Cardassian with a brother in the Obsidian Order. Jake follows the paper trail a little, traces the Cardassian with the brother in the Obsidian Order forward to stardate 51106.8. The Cardassian had an accident in Jeffries tube twelve. There's nothing on the brother. It makes Jake grin the kind of grin that doesn't signify amusement.

Sometimes Cardassians really are that dumb, but most of the time they aren't.

Up to date with his research, Jake heads back out into the crowds. He strolls down the Promenade, listens to conversations:

… I told him to clean the sheets but … Weyoun is such a creep … eration will be gone by winter … but blue birds, mommy …

Most of the time Jake hears nothing useful, but sometimes he does. Odo and Major Kira never stand in the same spot, but they always stand stationary and that gives Jake time to linger. They talk about the war, the station, the Federation, the occupation. They never sound angry. He knows he wouldn't be able to spy on them if they were angry about the occupation. They'd never let a Cardassian get as close as Jake gets, never mind a human kid.

But Jake Sisko isn't a kid anymore, and he's not just a human. He's a reporter for the Federation News Service, and Jake Sisko has a job to do.

In the afternoon Jake usually corners somebody for an interview, but first he has to lobby Weyoun for a few minutes (Jake: "When are you going to transmit my articles?" Weyoun: "When you stop referring to our presence on this station as an occupation. I assure you, the Dominion's intentions are entirely benevolent.") and then he has to get lunch. Reporting is hungry work. He heads back to Quark's. It's repetitive, Jake misses his dad, but at least Rom won't let Quark try to serve him yamok sauce.

Jake tries not to talk to Rom too often.

He thinks about Kira and Odo while he eats, about Vedek Yassim, about protests, about evil. Kira and Odo owe him an interview. The protest is something to confront them with. Maybe it'll make them angry.

He finishes quickly and heads to Odo's office. It's easy to find, a place he knows well, hauled in there way too many times past for loitering and playing tricks. He presses the chime, waits, steps inside at Odo's invitation. It's familiar, but he misses Nog.

The interview goes badly (Kira: "How much longer is this going to take?") and ends even worse (Kira: "I think this interview is over."), but at least he got to see where Major Kira's head is at, from the things she said and the things she didn't. Turns out, she's dead to it all. She's a collaborator and she doesn't even know it.

Odo is harder to read. Odo keeps his thoughts hidden from the world. Maybe Odo isn't thinking. Maybe Odo's only thinking about Major Kira. Bottom line is, Jake doesn't know what Odo's thinking, but that's okay, he can get an article from that. Jake can get an article from anything. It's a gift.

After his interview Jake heads back to his quarters to make more notes and do more digging. He speed-reads, but sometimes he pauses and thinks on it a little deeper. Dukat throws his dad's baseball at the walls whenever he takes a report from his chief engineer about the minefield. Weyoun tells the chief engineer to give Dukat reports on the minefield as often as possible. Quark likes his ears massaged (like that was some kind of secret). Once, somebody told Jake that Damar had programmed the molecular structure of tomato juice into the replicator in his quarters because Quark told him it was great for healthy scale.

Jake doesn't really believe that one. But it proves one thing:

People tell Jake everything.

He goes back out there once his notes are complete. Sometimes he goes back to Quark's and has dinner with Rom. Just a quiet meal between friends, nothing suspicious. Rom finishes the yamok sauce Quark puts on Jake's plate. They talk about Kira and Odo, about the war, about the Federation and the Bajorans. They don't talk about Leeta and Nog and his dad. It's the kind of thing doesn't need to be said.

Jake wonders if anybody listens to them talk. He wonders if anybody listens to them not talk. He wonders what things people hear in the silences.

Rom doesn't talk about why he stayed. That's a silence so loud Jake doesn't even need to listen. It's just there, a part of Rom, loud and jabbering a mile a minute. Even Weyoun must hear it. So must Dukat.

After dinner Jake wanders again, loiters anywhere he can. Sometimes he hears things. Sometimes he doesn't. He loiters by the Bajoran temple, hears again those whispers of evil and protests. There's a story in those whispers, if he can just listen hard enough.

He goes back to his quarters. Makes notes. Locks everything down for the night, keeps his information on padds out of the main computer core, encrypts them with every encryption code his dad ever taught him, and a few his dad didn't. Jake isn't Starfleet, he's Federation News Service, but that doesn't mean he hasn't picked up a few tricks.

Later, when Jake is half-asleep on the couch, an empty glass in his hand and a half-empty bottle on the floor by his feet, there's a chime at his door. He opens his eyes and calls enter.

It's always Greta.

She comes in and kisses him. She's wears thin clothes, things soft and sheer and easy to tear away. She touches him with the skill of a working girl made good, like Dabo is some kind of classy career, and Jake touches her back. They fuck in the half-light of the stars and the darkness of the closed wormhole. And it is fucking, hard and fast. It isn't love or lust. It's animal, and it's what they both need.

Sometimes Jake opens his eyes and catches her looking at him with a look in her eyes he can't quite place in a lover, if she is a lover. Sometimes he catches her looking at his padds. One time he woke up to find her trying to decrypt them. He thinks she might be a spy. A Cardassian spy in Bajoran skin.

But he keeps letting her in, every single night.

Sometimes being alone on the station is okay. Most of the time it isn't.


End file.
